by Ever since work moved out of town in late 2014 I’ve been carpooling with a 28-year-old guy who lives near the zoo in Newtown. Lately he’s been riding his bike to my place and I’ve driven him to work from there. He has a similar outlook on life to me but is far more extroverted and that outlook is far more obvious in the way he dresses and behaves. In fact we’re polar opposites when it comes to people. The absence of human interaction for significant periods is a necessity to me, and I rarely if ever get the urge to interact with lots of people all at once, but he just loves that. He loves it so much that whenever we have a team meeting at work, he feels the need to hijack the beginning of it by making everyone play a game. Today’s game involved people standing around in a circle and giving funny hand signals, a haka-like gesture, and some others that I’ve forgotten. I was out of my comfort zone, everyone knew it, and I knew that everyone knew it. I panicked and said I had “no fucking clue what was going on” which pretty much summed up the situation I found myself in. The only thing I really understood was one particular manoeuvre that would eliminate me from the game, so after one other person had been knocked out I made that gesture (oh, silly me!) and sat down. I then texted my carpool mate: “You just demonstrated why I’m going to Romania.” He’s the only one who knows I’m going there. At least I hope he is. It might seem a piffling thing, but I do find those games and team building activities, and frankly most of the team stuff that’s unavoidable at work, very uncomfortable and entirely demotivating. I really wish it wasn’t like this. It’s why I have to stick with my guns on my big adventure and do my English teaching, and not end up in some team environment where a guy just like my carpool mate – let’s call him Bogdan – decides to play some crazy game and I end up embarrassing myself and swearing in Romanian.
Last night I had my penultimate marimba session, and the last with our usual teacher before she goes to Germany. I’m completely within my comfort zone there. It feels great to do something that gets me animated after work where I’m really just going through the motions, and I’m not too bad at it because it relies on pattern recognition. I love seeing other people getting animated too when they’re just starting out. I see it when they play the bass marimba, which requires some serious arm action, for the first time.
Many people in the UK will be voting Leave as an act of desperation and I can’t say I blame them. I just don’t think leaving the EU will help them any more than a Donald Trump presidency will help desperate Americans, given the sort of characters who will be leading the country in the (now very likely) event of Brexit. At least a Trump presidency would be reversible four years later.
